Jun 26, 2015

Women not at church

A new Barna Group study says American women -- traditionally more religious than men -- are increasingly less likely to go to church. According to the poll, 45 percent of adult women haven't been to a religious service in the last six months.

Most of these women used to participate in worship services but have stopped.

"It's not that most of these unchurched women are unfamiliar with or inexperience in church," the report says, "but rather that at one point they decided church was no longer for them."

There has also been an increase in the number of women who self report they are skeptical of religious claims. The number of agnostics and atheists doesn't correlate to the number of women not going to church, however. Only 11 percent of women say they doubt or don't believe in God.

The cultural movement, here, is not towards unbelief. It's a movement towards disaffiliation.

Even for many women who are religious, Barna found that church is not a top priority. While 46 percent report they have been to church in the last month, only 11 percent said religious activities were most important in their lives. By comparison, 10 percent said personal time was their top priority.

By far, the number one top priority named by women was their families: 68 percent said family comes first.

Daniel Silliman teaches American religion and culture at the University of Heidelberg. His research interests include American evangelicals and pentecostals, book history, atheism and secularity.

Silliman has a B.A. in philosophy from Hillsdale College and an M.A. in American Studies from the University of Tübingen. He is currently working on his doctoral dissertation at Heidelberg on the representations of belief in contemporary evangelical fiction.

He previously worked as a reporter for a metro Atlanta newspaper, where he wrote about crime.

Francis Schaeffer's 1982 message to the Presbyterians at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., was pretty simple: the philosophy of modern society is humanism, and humanism means death.